We now arrive at what may be called the second period of Grecian history, beginning with the rule of Peisistratus at Athens and of Crœsus in Lydia.

It has been already stated that Peisistratus made himself despot of Athens in 560 b.c.: he died in 527 b.c., and was succeeded by his son Hippias, who was deposed and expelled in 510 b.c., thus making an entire space of fifty years between the first exaltation of the father and the final expulsion of the son. These chronological points are settled on good evidence: but the thirty-three years covered by the reign of Peisistratus are interrupted by two periods of exile, one of them lasting not less than ten years, the other, five years; and the exact place of the years of exile, being nowhere laid down upon authority, has been differently determined by the conjectures of chronologers. Partly from this half-known chronology, partly from a very scanty collection of facts, the history of the half-century now before us can only be given very imperfectly: nor can we wonder at our ignorance, when we find that even among the Athenians themselves, only a century afterwards, statements the most incorrect and contradictory respecting the Peisistratids were in circulation, as Thucydidês distinctly, and somewhat reproachfully, acquaints us.

From the Grecian settlements on the coast of Asia Minor and on the adjacent islands, our attention must now be turned to those non-Hellenic kingdoms and people with whom they there came in contact.

Our information with respect to all of them is unhappily very scanty. Nor shall we improve our narrative by taking the catalogue, presented in the Iliad, of allies of Troy, and construing it as if it were a chapter of geography: if any proof were wanting of the unpromising results of such a proceeding, we may find it in the confusion which darkens so much of the work of Strabo—who perpetually turns aside from the actual and ascertainable condition of the countries which he is describing, to conjectures on Homeric antiquity, often announced as if they were unquestionable facts. Where the Homeric geography is confirmed by other evidence, we note the fact with satisfaction; where it stands unsupported or difficult to reconcile with other statements, we cannot venture to reason upon it as in itself a substantial testimony. The author of the Iliad, as he has congregated together a vast body of the different sections of Greeks for the attack of the consecrated hill of Ilium, so he has also summoned all the various inhabitants of Asia Minor to co-operate in its defence, and he has planted portions of the Kilikians and Lykians, whose historical existence is on the southern coast, in the immediate vicinity of the Troad.

In the preceding chapters I have been under the necessity of presenting to the reader a picture altogether incoherent and destitute of central effect—to specify briefly each of the two or three hundred towns which agreed in bearing the Hellenic name, and to recount its birth and early life, as far as our evidence goes—but without being able to point out any action and reaction, exploits or sufferings, prosperity or misfortune, glory or disgrace, common to all. To a great degree, this is a characteristic inseparable from the history of Greece from its beginning to its end, for the only political unity which it ever receives is the melancholy unity of subjection under all-conquering Rome. Nothing short of force will efface in the mind of a free Greek the idea of his city as an autonomous and separate organization: the village is a fraction, but the city is an unit,—and the highest of all political units, not admitting of being consolidated with others into a ten or a hundred, to the sacrifice of its own separate and individual mark. Such is the character of the race, both in their primitive country and in their colonial settlements—in their early as well as in their late history—splitting by natural fracture into a multitude of self-administering, indivisible, cities.

Northward of the tribes called Epirotic lay those more numerous and widely extended tribes who bore the general name of Illyrians, bounded on the west by the Adriatic, on the east by the mountain-range of Skardus, the northern continuation of Pindus, and thus covering what is now called Middle and Upper Albania, together with the more northerly mountains of Montenegro, Herzegovina, and Bosnia. Their limits to the north and northeast cannot be assigned, but the Dardani and Autariatæ must have reached to the north-east of Skardus and even east of the Servian plain of Kossovo; while along the Adriatic coast, Skylax extends the race so far northward as to include Dalmatia, treating the Liburnians and Istrians beyond them as not Illyrian: yet Appian and others consider the Liburnians and Istrians as Illyrian, and Herodotus even includes under that name the Eneti or Veneti at the extremity of the Adriatic Gulf. The Bulini, according to Skylax, were the northernmost Illyrian tribe: the Amantini, immediately northward of the Epirotic Chaonians, were the southernmost. Among the southern Illyrian tribes are to be numbered the Taulantii – originally the possessors, afterwards the immediate neighbours, of the territory on which Epidamnus was founded. The ancient geographer Hekatæus (about 500 b.c.) is sufficiently well acquainted with them to specify their town Sesarêthus: he also named the Chelidonii as their northern, the Encheleis as their southern, neighbours; and the Abri also as a tribe nearly adjoining.

In the preceding chapter an account has been given, the best which we can pick out from Herodotus, of the steps by which the Asiatic Greeks became subject to Persia; and if his narrative is meagre, on a matter which vitally concerned not only so many of his brother Greeks, but even his own native city, we can hardly expect that he should tell us much respecting the other conquests of Cyrus. He seems to withhold intentionally various details which had come to his knowledge, and merely intimates in general terms that while Harpagus was engaged on the coast of the Ægean, Cyrus himself assailed and subdued all the nations of Upper Asia, “not omitting any one of them.” He alludes to the Baktrians and the Sakæ, who are also named by Ktêsias as having become subject partly by force, partly by capitulation; but he deems only two of the exploits of Cyrus worthy of special notice—the conquest of Babylon, and the final expedition against the Massagetæ. In the short abstract which we now possess of the lost work of Ktêsias, no mention appears of the important conquest of Babylon; but his narrative, as far as the abstract enables us to follow it, diverges materially from that of Herodotus, and must have been founded on data altogether different.

That vast space comprised between the rivers Strymon and Danube, and bounded to the west by the easternmost Illyrian tribes, northward of the Strymon, was occupied by the innumerable subdivisions of the race called Thracians or Threïcians. They were the most numerous and most terrible race known to Herodotus: could they by possibility act in unison or under one dominion (he says), they would be irresistible. A conjunction thus formidable once seemed impending, during the first years of the Peloponnesian war, under the reign of Sitalkês king of the Odrysæ, who reigned from Abdêra at the mouth of the Nestus to the Euxine, and compressed under his sceptre a large proportion of these ferocious but warlike plunderers; so that the Greeks even down to Thermopylæ trembled at his expected approach. But the abilities of that prince were not found adequate to bring the whole force of Thrace into effective co-operation and aggression against others.

Numerous as the tribes of Thracians were, their customs and character (according to Herodotus) were marked by great uniformity: of the Getæ, the racter. Trausi, and others, he tells us a few particularities.

Hitherto the history of the Asiatic Greeks has flowed in a stream distinct from that of the European Greeks. The present chapter will mark the period of confluence between the two.

At the time when Darius quitted Sardis on his return to Susa, carrying with him the Milesian Histiæus, he left Artaphernês his brother as satrap of Sardis, invested with the supreme command of Western Asia Minor. The Grecian cities on the coast, comprehended under his satrapy, appear to have been chiefly governed by native despots in each; and Milêtus especially, in the absence of Histiæus, was ruled by his son-in-law Aristagoras. That city was now in the height of power and prosperity—in every respect the leading city of Ionia. The return of Darius to Susa may be placed seemingly about 512 b.c., from which time forward the state of things above described continued, without disturbance, for eight or ten years—“ a respite from suffering,” to use the significant phrase of the historian.

It was about the year 506 b.c. that the exiled Athenian despot Hippias, after having been repelled from Sparta by the unanimous refusal of the Lacedæmonian allies to take part in his cause, presented himself from Sigeium as a petitioner to Artaphernês at Sardis.